There's a pattern we see with almost every website redesign that comes through our door. The client spent real money, worked with a real designer, and ended up with a site that looks significantly better than what they had before. Then the analytics roll in and the conversion rate is identical to — or worse than — the old site.
The redesign fixed the wrong things.
A beautiful site that doesn't convert is a very expensive digital business card. The aesthetics are what everyone focuses on during the design process, and the user experience is what actually determines whether someone calls, books a demo, or buys something. These are not the same thing, and optimizing for one while ignoring the other is how you end up with a site that wins design praise and generates nothing for the business.
This is the 50-point UX checklist we run before any site goes live. Work through it before your next launch — or use it to diagnose why your current site isn't converting the way it should.
The First 5 Seconds: Clarity and Hook
This is the most important section on this list. If someone lands on your site and can't immediately understand what you do, who it's for, and why they should care — they leave. In most markets, you have somewhere between three and eight seconds. Most websites waste them.
- Vague headline. We help you reach your potential is not a headline. We build websites for home service businesses that book more jobs is a headline. Test: can a stranger read your hero text and know exactly what you do in under five seconds?
- Talking about yourself before the customer. Your hero section shouldn't open with your founding story or years in business. It should open with the problem your customer has and how you solve it. Lead with them, not you.
- No visible call to action above the fold. Every hero needs a clear, obvious next step. Not subtle. Not elegant. Obvious. Book a Free Consultation. Get a Quote. The button should be findable without scrolling.
- Stock photos that look like stock photos. The smiling people in headsets or the diverse team around a conference table are instantly recognizable as fake and undermine trust in ways that are hard to measure but very real. Use photos of your actual team, your actual product, your actual work.
- Buried value proposition. Your reason-to-choose-you belongs near the top — ideally in the hero, definitely in the first scroll. If it's at the bottom of the page, it might as well not exist.
- Slow load time. Over 53% of mobile users abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Your hero image alone can cause this problem. Test your page speed before you launch anything.
- Unlabeled navigation icons. Icons without text labels force users to guess. Label your navigation.
- Headline without a supporting subheadline. A bold claim needs one sentence of support. The fastest delivery in Austin needs a subheadline that explains what that means — same day, within the hour, guaranteed. Don't leave the claim hanging.
- Autoplay video with sound. This is the website equivalent of someone honking their horn outside your window. It startles people, it's annoying, and it causes immediate abandonment. If you use video in the hero, mute it by default.
- Low contrast text. Light gray text on white. Dark text on a dark image. These are readability problems that also fail accessibility standards. Run your contrast ratios through a checker before signing off on any design.
Navigation and Discovery
If visitors can't find what they're looking for, they won't ask — they'll leave. Navigation sounds like a solved problem. It consistently isn't.
- Too many navigation items. Five to seven top-level items is the sweet spot. More than that and you're forcing users to process too many choices at once.
- Broken search. If your site has a search function, test it for common misspellings and related terms. A search that returns no results for anything less than a perfect query is worse than no search at all.
- Contact information buried. Your phone number and email should be findable in under ten seconds from any page on the site. If it's not in the header, it needs to be in a visible footer location.
- No breadcrumbs on deep pages. For sites with more than two levels of navigation, breadcrumbs tell users where they are and how to get back. Without them, people get lost and bounce.
- Mobile navigation that's hard to tap. Hamburger menus that are too small, links too close together, dropdowns that don't work on touch — these kill mobile conversions quietly. Test your navigation on an actual phone.
- Hover menus that disappear. If your dropdown requires mouse precision to stay open, you have a usability problem. Any menu that closes when the mouse moves a few pixels will frustrate users regularly.
- Footer with no useful links. The footer is where users go when they've exhausted the main navigation. Privacy policy, contact, FAQ, careers — these belong there and they should all work.
- Pages that end without a next step. Every page should point somewhere. Related articles, a CTA, a contact link. Dead ends are quiet conversion killers.
- Inconsistent navigation placement. If your contact button moves from page to page, users notice even if they can't articulate why it feels off. Consistency builds confidence.
Conversion and Form Friction
This is where the money is. Every piece of friction between a potential customer and a completed form is costing you real revenue.
- Too many required fields. For first contact, you need a name, email, and maybe a phone number. Asking for company size, budget, and timeline before you've earned that information will dramatically reduce completions.
- Generic CTA copy. Submit is not a call to action. Get My Free Quote is a call to action. The button copy should describe what happens when you click it.
- No inline form validation. Don't wait until submit to tell someone their email is formatted incorrectly. Inline validation reduces errors and frustration at the same time.
- Aggressive captchas. Image recognition captchas that require identifying fire hydrants to send a contact form are a significant barrier. Use invisible reCAPTCHA or a honeypot field instead.
- Single-page checkout with too many fields. A progress bar with multiple steps converts better than a wall of fields on one screen. Users feel momentum rather than overwhelm.
- No pricing transparency. Contact us for pricing makes sense for complex custom work. In most cases, it filters out prospects who would have been a great fit if they'd known you were in their range. Provide a starting at price at minimum.
- Forced account creation before purchase. Guest checkout is not optional for e-commerce. Forcing account creation before completing a purchase is one of the leading causes of cart abandonment.
- Prominent discount code field. A large, obvious coupon code input on your checkout page sends customers to Google to find one. If they find a code from a discount site, you've trained them to never pay full price. Make it subtle.
- No privacy reassurance near email fields. A simple we never share your information next to your email field meaningfully increases form completion rates.
- Buttons that are too small to tap. On mobile, any interactive element smaller than 44x44 pixels is difficult to tap reliably. Check button sizes on an actual device, not just a browser resize.
Trust and Authority
People make purchase decisions based on trust. Everything on your website is either building or eroding it — including the things you don't think of as trust signals.
- Outdated copyright in the footer. 2022 in 2025 tells visitors the site has been neglected. Update it, or automate it.
- No real team photos. A faceless About Us page communicates that there are no real humans behind this business. Photos of actual people — real names, real faces, real bios — build trust in ways that stock imagery cannot.
- Generic testimonials. Great service, would recommend — John D. This is worth nothing. Full names, job titles, company names, specific results. If you can get a photo and company logo, even better.
- No trust badges or certifications. If you have certifications, partnerships, awards, or press mentions, they need to be visible. These are third-party credibility signals your claims alone can't replace.
- Broken links anywhere on the site. A 404 error tells visitors your business doesn't pay attention to details. Audit your links before launch and set up monitoring for after.
- Claims without proof. The best in the industry is a claim. A case study showing you increased a client's revenue by 47% is proof. Lead with the proof.
- Visible typos and grammatical errors. Sloppy writing signals sloppy work. Proofread everything, then have someone else proofread it again.
- Social links to dormant accounts. If your social icon leads to an account that last posted in 2020, remove the link. Dead accounts are worse than no social presence.
- No physical location when it's relevant. For local businesses especially, a visible address builds legitimacy. It signals permanence and accountability. Don't hide it.
Mobile and Technical Issues
More than half of web traffic is mobile. If your site has technical issues on smaller screens, you're losing more than half your potential customers before they've read a word.
- Full-screen mobile popups. Google penalizes intrusive interstitials on mobile. Beyond the SEO penalty, they're a terrible experience. If you use popups, make sure they're dismissible and don't cover the full screen on mobile.
- Horizontal scrolling. Content wider than the viewport is a broken experience. Check every page at 375px width and fix anything that requires horizontal scrolling.
- Unoptimized images. A 4MB hero image tanks page speed on mobile connections. Compress every image, use WebP format, and lazy-load anything below the fold.
- Phone numbers that aren't tappable. On mobile, phone numbers should be tel: links so users can tap to call. Forcing someone to copy and paste a number is unnecessary friction.
- Text smaller than 16px. Text below 16px is difficult to read on mobile without zooming in. Default to 16px as your minimum body text size.
- No Open Graph metadata. When your pages are shared on Slack or LinkedIn and show up with no image, no title, and no description — that's a failure of basic technical setup. Every page should have proper OG tags.
- Sticky header that consumes too much screen. A header taking up 20% of the mobile viewport while scrolling eats the reading space on your most important content. Shrink the sticky header or disable it on mobile.
- Dark patterns. Popups that are intentionally hard to close, pre-checked subscription boxes, guilt-trip copy on opt-out buttons. These annoy the people who notice them and erode trust with those who don't. Don't.
How to Use This Checklist
Don't try to fix everything at once. Work through section by section, prioritize by impact — the first two sections will typically move the needle most — and document what you find so you can track improvements over time.
The most valuable version of this exercise isn't running it once before a launch. It's making it a quarterly habit, because user behavior changes, your site changes, and new issues emerge over time that weren't there six months ago.
A website that converts isn't finished — it's continuously improved. The businesses that treat their website as a living asset rather than a completed project are the ones whose conversion rates keep getting better year over year.
